A "teaching moment" for the White House

For a group of people who achieved genius reputations for beating the odds by propelling a one-term, relatively obscure U. S. Senator into the White House, the top tier Obama Administration staff hasn’t done a great deal to justify its early reputation.

The President’s standing in the polls has declined steadily in the last year and the latest political setback --- the election of a Republican to the U. S. Senate from Massachusetts --- has sent the President and his advisers scrambling to establish an alternative identity to win back the American people.

The President’s team has stumbled badly in making the transition from campaigning to governing and has fallen back on a normally reliable tactic --- when problems arise, put the candidate (President) in front of the media. With an individual as charismatic and articulate as Obama and armed with the power of the presidency, the temptation to bring his qualities to bear on any issue, regardless of significance, is irresistible.

Americans noted little progress in pulling the nation out of the economic morass into which it had fallen and now blame Obama for failing to devote attention to resolving the very issues upon which he was elected. Massachusetts’ voters took it out on poor Martha Coakley.

While overhaul of the nation’s health care system, the Administration’s signature issue, was sinking steadily into the political/ideological quagmire on Capitol Hill, with unemployment hovering around 10 per cent, home foreclosures rising steadily, business failures increasing, and a deepening angst about personal economic well-being, the White House was preoccupied with the following:

• Attacking radio talk show personality Rush Limbaugh, attempting to portray him as the nation’s leading Republican. It was a remarkably foolish and counter-productive exercise. I’ve never been a Limbaugh fan (too shrill, too condescending and too often inaccurate), but to attack him is to empower him and he gleefully seized the opportunity to be elevated to the President’s level.

• Attacking Fox News channel, its reporters and commentators, for biased reporting and suggesting it wasn’t a legitimate news media outlet. The entire episode depicted Obama as a petty politician unable to withstand criticism. Even some of his political supporters and normally supportive media types cringed at the White House action.

• Needlessly injecting the President into a dispute over the Cambridge, Mass., police department’s handling of a disturbance involving a black professor at Harvard. Obama was forced to retract criticism of the police and wound up with a bizarre “beer summit”, sitting around a picnic table on the South Lawn of the White House with the officer and the professor, looking like Dr. Phil counseling a warring husband and wife before a sympathetic studio audience.

• Jetting off on an overnight trip to Copenhagen to pitch the International Olympic Committee on the wonders of Chicago as the site for the Olympic Games, even after he was warned his drop by would be resented and that the decision on the host city had already been made.

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• Zipping off to Copenhagen once again to an international conference on climate change, despite its being made clear that the conference was a public relations nightmare and that the only item the delegates agreed upon was that they were all somewhere in Scandinavia.

• Attacking the U. S. Supreme Court over its ruling that restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and labor unions is a violation of the First Amendment. Coming from a candidate who raised a record-shattering amount of money, he sounded hypocritical.

These incidents have a common theme --- they’re campaign events, moves made in the heat of election contests to dominate the next news cycle rather than to create any impression of the candidate as a problem solver.

The recent recruitment of his campaign manager as a super political overseer to prevent more Massachusetts surprises and assure Democratic majorities in the Congress reinforces the perception that the White House continues to believe the proper amount of political pressure applied at the proper time will right the ship.

Had the President allowed the Cambridge police to resolve the dispute with the professor, or the IOC to make its decision, or ignore Limbaugh and Fox News in favor of a more concentrated effort to win approval of his health care agenda, would the outcome have been different?

Obama relied on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to win approval of the legislation and Reid responded by selling off parts of the plan to pick up enough votes to pass it. Now that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the Senate bill won’t be approved in the House, Reid looks like a shifty blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, Obama’s been weakened as a leader of his party, and health care reform has been mortally wounded.

It’s been remarked often that campaigning is easy, governing is hard. Brilliance at one doesn’t necessarily translate into success at the other. The President’s staff has blurred the lines separating campaigning from governing.

Obama is fond of describing controversies as “a teaching moment.” His staff should take note that 2009 was a 12-month moment.